Darker now when I leave the apartment on my morning walk. The season continues its march through Time, walking towards the Autumnal Equinox just sixteen days away. Has this year flown by or what?

Many thoughts and ideas have been rolling around in my head this past week but the Writing Muse has been away. It’s as if a certain reluctance set in on top of my voice … why? who can say? A pressure, a weight of thought: it gets in the way of making words make sense, a certain reluctance sets in and nothing seems right as I type it.

Press on. Press on. Must work through these moments of pause.

I was thinking about the street fair and street photography I did last week, and the importance of gesture. Looking at the still life work I do and thinking about gesture, expression. They’re still about gesture, form, shape and movement … Still Life: the life part is important. Hmm.

What indeed do I see there, in those bits of flotsam and jetsam blown into composition by the movement of sun and wind? For the past week, I put the camera down and walked without it in the mornings: just studied what my eyes were doing as I looked at things, how they focused, how they processed the darks into bright and the brights into seeable values of light. A very interesting study. Can I combiine these observations of how my eyes work into an approach to making photographs … both capturing and rendering them? Hmm.

It was time on Wednesday for the second part of my annual eye exam … a dilation so they could examine my retinas. I scheduled the afternoon free as once they put those drops in it’s unsafe for me to drive for at least two or three hours. There’s a movie theater in the complex where my eye doctor’s offices are, a fine place to relax and let the eyes recoup.

Still sensitive after the film, I watched again how my eyes and brain perceived and processed the world about me. Fascinating how different my perceptions of space and geometry, light and shade were: I saw things in a completely different way from normal. I wish I’d brought my camera so I could record its view of the same scenes, which looked so interesting to me. Can I retain the way they worked in that state and apply *that* to my photography as well?

Wednesday evening, a friend I hadn’t seen in a score of years or thereabouts called. “Passing through town, let’s do dinner!” So I told him where a good Italian dive was, hopped into the car with Felipe, and rushed over. A terrific time, telling stories and coming up to date on each other’s life. In my objective mind state, I watched our expressions, the movements of hand and eye, the nod of head and shoulders. Gesture again. Fast, ephemeral … moments frozen in time and context with the snapshot of the mind’s camera. Freezing that context into memory to look at again.

These leaves, this twig. It fell from a height, floated on the wind, then lay where Fate decided it would rest a while. The sun dappled it lightly against the textured asphalt. It was there for the moment, it will have been gone again soon. I’ll remember it now.

Like this:

Related

What’s this BS about not being able to write? reads to me like tou are writing very well, indeed. Indeed. Your photography is at least as good as any of the so great street workers I have ever heard of… Atget, Diane Arbus… that gang… all you need to do is go study the Partial Differential equations some more to scramble you upper lonbes and keep on going,Pal.. Love you